(Partially) Empty Nest

December 29th, 2002, was the most terrifying car ride of my life. I sat in the backseat, knuckles white as I grasped the car seat, silently praying that the unthinkable would not occur while knowing in my heart that it would. We would get into an accident and never make it home. And I had no way to protect the brand new human riding beside me.

Looking back, I know that it wasn’t actually a scary ride. The speed limit on the expressway through Grand Rapids was still fifty-five back then, and it was a Sunday afternoon. Practically no one was on the streets, and we were only traveling eight miles. But I was a new mom, and everything in the world was designed to harm my child.

The car ride we took on September 21st, 2024 wasn’t nearly as scary (even though the early morning fog created a very real danger that we hadn’t faced twenty-two years before), but everything about it should have been. Because I was driving that very same baby to the airport (an airport three miles from the apartment to which we’d made that first, harrowing post-natal journey) to send him two-thousand miles away from me and my biological imperative to make the world safe for him.

My son is a grown person now. I can trust (within reason) that he’s not going to eat a thumbtack off the floor or drown himself in the toilet. He has more money in the bank at twenty-two than I ever had at that age (of course, I was twenty-two on that Sunday morning terror journey and therefore my capital was tied up in diapers). There’s an apartment waiting for him, with a girlfriend and a roommate, and the whole city of Los Angeles to find work and build a life in. He’s been raised to be independent, despite the fact that I cut his meat and poured his juice for far too long (my fed-up husband slammed his fork down during dinner one night and roared, “For god’s sake, Jen, he’s fourteen years old!”). My son knows he can call us for help with things, and he also knows how to find answers to problems on his own. But as I watched him maneuver his three suitcases and giant backpack through check-in, I thought: this is wrong. This is all wrong.

To my heart, I was failing. I was being neglectful and reckless. Who just lets their child go to California by themselves? Who would allow their precious baby to go off into a world that’s already cruel, to a place currently surrounded by fire and under constant threat of The Big One?

At the same age my son is now, his father and I were heading home to our two-bedroom basement apartment with thirty dollars in our checking account and a brand new human to care for. The evidence points to our son’s new situation being entirely survivable, on a pretty low difficulty setting in comparison. But none of that matters to my irrational, forever-altered-by-pregnancy brain. While I can logically accept that he’s safe, he’s well, and everyone leaves the nest at some point, and I can even be proud of him for making such a big step, I can’t reason with the tight, squeezing feeling in my chest that leaves me suddenly breathless or the burning wet in my eyes that I have to hastily blink away. This is what kids are supposed to do. My job as an active parent was always supposed to end. With some exceptions, the goal of raising a child is to see them eventually leave you.

I don’t think people are entirely honest about what it feels like for a child to leave home, even under perfect first-time-home-leaving conditions. Parents with three kids in high school dream of what it will be like “when the kids are out on their own.” When those three kids peel off the exit ramp to college or marriage or adventure, those parents are supposed to tell everyone about how great life is as an “empty-nester.” The house is cleaner and quieter, they can drop whatever they’re doing and traipse off for the weekend if they feel like it. They don’t have to hide snacks anymore and they can have sex right in the middle of the day and make as much noise as they want. It’s like parents with adult children seek out parents deep in the throes of soccer practice commutes and puberty mood swings specifically, just to gloat that one day, the kids will be gone and your life will be as great as theirs are.

I think they’re mostly lying.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s going to be nice to have all our forks back in the kitchen, rather than strewn around my kid’s bedroom. And I’m looking forward to a larger share of our sparse internet connectivity. But the mainstream, nuclear-family-normative culture around me didn’t prepare me at all for the sadness I feel. I spent a whole day in bed. I told my usually stoic husband that I’m sad. He said, “Me, too.” For anyone who knows him, that’s the equivalent of falling to the ground wailing. We still have one child at home, but she’s sad, too. “Now our portions are going to be weird,” she said when I turned on the oven to make dinner. Our son didn’t just take our Nintendo Switch along with him. He took our normalcy.

Maybe it isn’t right to describe this feeling as grief. After all, we didn’t lose our son. We know where he is. He’s in Long Beach. We have his address and everything. But it feels like a death: the death of the way our family operated for two decades. And just like when an actual death is expected, it’s still a sudden shock when it actually happens. There’s still an adjustment that has to be reckoned with, a hole where the person used to be every day. The difference is that unlike a death, I can reasonably say that I will see my kid again, without a bunch of anonymous internet trolls quoting contradictory bible verses at me to explain why my coping method is “illogical.”

We should be more honest with parents about a lot of things. How really fucking expensive kids are (two gallons of milk just lasted four days straight for the first time in ten years and I almost wept). How everyone will give you unsolicited advice in a tone that suggests you’re failing, and worse, you’re the only parent alive who’s failing. We should be honest about the doubts we all feel. And we should be honest with each other about the grieving aspect of watching your family transition from a couple of kids and a couple of parents to an adult, a teen, and a couple of parents who spam the group chat hoping for proof of life. Because the amount of time you have to prepare to let your baby go is the time between that ride home from the hospital and the ride to the airport. And it goes faster than anyone ever expects.